Today's McArdle Award Winner

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In which we memorialize the dumbest punditry connected to the schoolhouse massacre in Connecticut by measuring it against the thoughts of Megan McArdle, who believes that human-wave attacks by toddlers would have been the best solution.

There was not a single adult male on the school premises when the shooting occurred. In this school of 450 students, a sizeable number of whom were undoubtedly 11- and 12-year-old boys (it was a K-6 school), all the personnel - the teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the school psychologist, the "reading specialist" - were female. There didn't even seem to be a male janitor to heave his bucket at Adam Lanza's knees. Women and small children are sitting ducks for mass-murderers. The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, seemed to have performed bravely. According to reports, she activated the school's public-address system and also lunged at Lanza, before he shot her to death. Some of the teachers managed to save all or some of their charges by rushing them into closets or bathrooms. But in general, a feminized setting is a setting in which helpless passivity is the norm. Male aggression can be a good thing, as in protecting the weak - but it has been forced out of the culture of elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel. Think of what Sandy Hook might have been like if a couple of male teachers who had played high-school football, or even some of the huskier 12-year-old boys, had converged on Lanza.

OK. I've thought about it. THEY'D ALL BE DEAD NOW, TOO.

Give Allen credit. At least she's upped the age for the schoolchildren who should be used for suicide missions against armored gunmen into the pre-adolescent range. (She also seems to be under the mistaken conclusion that former offensive tackles are bulletproof.) More to the point, the evidence says that Victoria Soto, who was buried today, put herself between the gunman and her students, just the way that manly-man Secret Service dudes are supposed to do in case someone takes a pop at the president.

American conservatism has been rendered a parody of a burlesque of a puppet show. And Charlotte Allen should be shunned by decent people. Hell, people who think like this should be shunned by bacteria.